Learning Styles

An individual's learning style consists of a relatively stable pattern of behavior that the person applies when learning new information (Swisher & Schoorman, 2001). These behaviors are seen over a variety of learning environments throughout a person's lifetime. While some learning styles appear to work better with the teaching style or approach used in a given situation, no learning style is inherently better than any other (Swisher & Schoorman, 2001). All learning styles have value for the individual who is using them. An important distinction often used to characterize learning styles is field independent versus field dependent. Researchers have described the learning style often adopted by African Americans as being more field dependent, which means they approach learning from a global perspective and tend to be more sensitive to social factors in the environment (Swisher & Schoorman, 2001). In addition, field dependent learners respond better to external motivation. African Americans students tend to prefer learning through movement, relate to teachers on a more personal level, and learn best through group activities (Swisher & Schoorman, 2001). Swisher and Schoorman describe how African American youth are often fiercely competitive on the playground, but prefer to be cooperative and person oriented in the classroom (2001). The authors point out how this approach is in stark contrast to the expectation in must school settings where individual work and cooperative play are often encouraged (Swisher & Schoorman, 2001).Irvine and York identified other characteristics common to African American learning styles including a preference to think in terms of the big picture, and a tendency to generalize the results taken from a data set versus the more mainstream classroom model which favors being very precise with numerical data (Swisher & Schoorman, 2001). An important take-away from an analysis of the learning styles common among African American students is that many of them are in conflict with the approaches used in mainstream American classrooms. A mindful clinician must take this discrepancy into account when considering the big picture during an evaluation of an African American child. While these learning preferences are not applicable to every African American student, it is important to think about whether or not there is a gap between the expectations of the learning environment and the student's learning style which may be contributing to concerns about their classroom performance.